This Is How We Do It: Phaeder EFJ - Online Only Release

I found the CD Baby people cool to work with as well, their site looks like a late '90s low-fi version of Days of Our Lives, but boy is that thing functional! And the service is prompt and caring. MySpace is a friends network, and the largest on the planet at that, but bear in mind that it requires feeding and watering - you must actively network. Contrary to common belief, the more friends you have does not equal more plays and sales of your tracks. I came across a profile which had 10 times the number of friends as mine, but only a tenth of the number of plays my tunes get.

My advice (from experience) is to build meaningful relationships and communicate well.  When you design your MySpace site, make sure it really contains valuable info, change the content every now and then, and make sure it loads quickly.

Another thing I learned by serendipity is called 'chunking'. Chunking is a technique used primarily for things written for the web, but is also heavily used in advertising. You edit your written content in a way that keeps it flowing and consumable, with different types of fonts, background colours and font sizes to create text that has a 'scent' and draws the reader to it - eye voodoo!

Tip:Leaders are readers. I spent a lot of time researching the online social networking phenomenon. There are a plethora of forums and user groups you can hook into and I also found a couple of cool books. I can recommend Robert Kyiosaki - The Cashflow Quadrant, Bob Baker - Myspace Music Marketing and John Pospisil - Hacking MySpace.

MySpace is not the means to an end. As a musician you need to have your own website otherwise if MySpace falls over one day, you lose your web presence all together. Where are your friends, your contacts, your fan base and customers? The other factor here is that some record companies won't take you seriously if you only have a MySpace web address - and I have had that confirmed!

I found it is good to have a record label (or three). Debatable, some might argue, if you are a successful self-promoter and have your sales chops down, but I prefer to concentrate on the music. The function of a record company is to sell your product, look after the distribution, promotion, deliveries and royalties etc. That basic role has not changed even with the increase in virtual and digital media.

I chose B&3 as a label because they were the international distributor for 'Lotus Beat' and because they understand what I do musically (not an easy feat). As a plus they also know international copyright law very well and have affiliations in the Americas.

Producing an album alone is a time consuming and labour intensive undertaking. Most of the musicians I know are in this for the long haul and prepared to go all the way. If you think there is a quick buck here, make no mistake - there isn't. It takes a solid three to six months studio time (and that is fast), a month researching the web, another month setting up websites, getting ads happening, liaising with publishers, and refining the product etc. It can be a bit much at times, but in the end we love music and it is a great feeling to see your stuff out there in a worldwide market!

After finishing production and review, recompiling and re-mastering a few numbers, I sent the whole shebang off to the label and they passed it on to the big muscle distributor. Again a word of caution, most distributors (online or physical) do not accept unsolicited material so having at least a publisher, even if it is your own record company on paper, gives you advantage in the game. My publisher in Germany (B&3 Berlin) not only has the power to deal with and negotiate directly with large entities, but also assists in streamlining the material as in 'A&R man'.

The record company deals with the online distributors and gets your work into the online shops. If I imagine having to go to all the iTunes, Napsters and Rhapsodies of this world myself instead of making my music, Buddha, I'd grow gray hair, shrivel up and die from exhaustion and boredom - so: record label!

In the case of EFJ, the relationship between my publisher, the 'online warehouse' and my little old self, yielded around 100 online shops being supplied with my off-the-wall 'EFJ' product.

Than I went to Yahoo advertising, Google ads and (don't spit the dummy) Microsoft and created some nifty little sponsored online ads. A friend did a reading a couple of days ago and there were 11,000 entries for Phaeder. Need I say more? The industrial age is over and the information age has well left the station people. And of course, I had to take advantage of YouTube and make a cheesy little video, which I shot in my house, wrote a mean soundtrack to and edited the whole thing in Windows Moviemaker.